This gruesome Harper's Weekly
cartoon graphically reveals the devastation wrought on the buffalo population of
the American West in the 1870s.

When the first Europeans colonized the
Atlantic coastline in the seventeenth century, buffalo could be found from
southern New York to northern Georgia. As the settlements spread, the
buffalo were pushed further westward. In the 1750s, Daniel Boone hunted
buffalo in the Carolinas, but by 1769 he could only hunt them on the western
slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1832 the last buffalo living east
of the Mississippi River were killed in Wisconsin.

As Americans explored and then settled
the prairie lands of the trans-Mississippi West during the early and
mid-nineteenth century, the massive number of buffalo there shocked them.
The plains region of North America had always been the primary habitat for the
American buffalo, and in the early-nineteenth century it was home to an
estimated 30-200 million. The wild buffalo was a large, hardy creature
that could easily survive the harsh winters of the Western prairie.

Plains Indians considered the buffalo
to be sacred, and it was vital to their survival. They used its hide for robes,
blankets, and other protective coverings, its meat for food, and its dried
manure for heating fuel.The method
Plains Indians employed for killing buffalo was either to surround the animals
or drive them off a cliff. The instruments they favored were bows
and arrows or spears until the introduction of an accurate repeating-rifle in
the 1870s. In battle against the white settlers or army, the Indians
treated the buffalo as a decoy and a shield. The number of buffalo killed
by the Indians was small, but it grew as they began supplying white traders.

The market for buffalo robes was
already flourishing by the 1840s, and the hunting of the animal for sport became
popular in the Kansas Territory during the 1850s.The expansion of the railroad system to the American West beginning in
the late 1860s adversely affected the buffalo. The railroad companies
contracted with buffalo hunters to provide meat for their construction workers.
More importantly, completion of the lines brought a far larger number of
settlers to the region than ever before and provided easier and more productive
means of transporting buffalo robes to Eastern markets. Buffalo meat was
shipped by rail only during the winter months until primitive types of
refrigerated cars were adopted in the 1870s (though spoilage continued to be a
problem). Railroad companies realized that although the large buffalo
herds could be a nuisance when they blocked the tracks, they also entertained
the passengers. The firms ran special excursion trains for sightseers and
(particularly) sport hunters, which they advertised widely in Eastern
newspapers.

Through 1871, the major commercial
product derived from the buffalo were robes, and as the supply increased, so did
the demand. The buffalo robes, as the Indians knew, were effective
protection against cold weather, which was especially important to drivers and
passengers in the open, horse-drawn vehicles of the day. In the winter of
1870-1871, tanneries in the United States, England, and Germany seeking an
alternative source to cattle for leather experimented successfully with buffalo
hides. Word of the new market for buffalo spread quickly and hunters
flooded the prairies.They demanded
more accurate rifles, which the Remington and Sharps companies soon provided.When the southern herds were depleted in the 1870s, hunters
moved with the expanding railroads to the northern plains. By 1884, the
buffalo herds in the north had been decimated as well.

A few isolated voices had been raised
before the Civil War to criticize the wanton destruction of the buffalo, but,
with the herds obviously plentiful in the West, such concerns were ignored.
As the buffalo population plunged in the early 1870s, a small movement arose for
the enactment of protective legislation. However, those states or
territories that passed such measures did so after the local buffalo population
had already collapsed, or found that the laws were difficult to enforce.

In 1871, R. C. McCormick, the
congressional delegate from the Arizona Territory introduced a bill in the U.S.
House for the protection of the buffalo, but it never made it out of committee.
He tried again the next year by showing other congressmen an illustrated article
in Harper's Weekly that warned of the impending extermination of the
buffalo. The illustration by Theodore Davis shows wolves and vultures
devouring the carcasses of dead buffalo. McCormick also read letters on
the House floor from army officers, Indian agents, and the head of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that urged the federal government to
take action.

McCormick overplayed his hand when he
read a letter pointing out the devastating effect the loss of the buffalo had on
the Plains Indians. It reminded congressmen who favored a hard-line Indian
policy that allowing the destruction of the buffalo would expedite the goal of
undermining the Indian population. Yet widespread newspaper reporting of
the continued decimation of the buffalo finally prompted Congress to pass
protective legislation in the spring of 1874. But President Ulysses S.
Grant pocket-vetoed the measure. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano
had recently reported to the president that "the total disappearance of the
buffalo" was an effective way to encourage the Indians to adopt an
agricultural lifestyle, which (white) reformers desired. Grant's chief
military advisors on Indian policy, Generals William Sherman and Philip
Sheridan, argued that the Indians would be forced to capitulate to the army once
the buffalo was gone.

Harper's Weekly continued to
condemn the destruction of the buffalo herds. This cartoon appeared near
the time of Grant's veto, and its theme is later amplified in a full-page cover
illustration of the December 12, 1874 issue. The latter sketch,
"Slaughtered for the Hide," shows a dead, skinned buffalo (like the
one in the cartoon) dominating the foreground of the picture, as the hunter
holds a knife in one hand and the animal's skin aloft with the other.

By
the mid-1880s, only a few hundred buffalo existed, located primarily in the area
of Yellowstone National Park. The 1872 law establishing the park
prohibited the "wanton destruction" of fish or game "for the
purposes of merchandise or profit." Poachers, though, took advantage
of the absence of enforcement mechanisms and no funding during the park’s
first five years. Conditions were so bad in 1886 that a U.S. Cavalry unit
had to police the park. The situation remained much the same until 1894
when President Grover Cleveland signed the Yellowstone Protection Act into law.
It banned killing game, cutting timber, or removing mineral deposits upon
penalty of fines and jail time. Other preservation measures were taken
throughout the twentieth century. Today, there are about 350,000 buffalo
in North America.